


La Mer

by billspilledquill



Series: the quality of mercy [1]
Category: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Period-Typical Sexism, Platonic Relationships, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-07 03:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17952614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: What in a name?Glory, he thinks,humiliation. All that is good and bad, all that is worth and worthless.Life. A name is for a life.Edmond Dantès is dead.





	La Mer

**Author's Note:**

> This book has ruined me; I will probably write more, so run before it’s too late.

 

 

 _Maintenant_ _Dieu_ _me_ _garde_  ! _Où_ _vais_ - _je_  ? _Eh_  ! _que_ _m’importe ?_  
_Quels_ _que_ _soient_ _mes_ _destins_ , _je_ _dis_ _comme_ _Byron_  :  
«  _L’Océan_ _peut_ _gronder_ , _il_ _faudra_ _qu’il_ _me_ _porte_. »  
_Si_ _mon_ _coursier_ _s’abat_ , _j’y_ _mettrai_   _l’éperon_.

 

 

When Dantès isn’t dreaming about pearl-less palaces and dark dungeons, he dreams about the sea. 

“Edmond,” Mercédès whispers, her eyes like glass. “When you come back, we’ll get married.” 

And Dantès hits his name like a curse and that glass shatters like everything else that Mercédès is: futile, bird-like, frail; woman.

When. When you come back. When is a curious, useless way of telling. Brave, fearless way of declaring themselves the winner of a game against god. Can’t say when _I_ _marry_ _Mercédès_ , _when_ _I_ _leave_ _Château_ _d’If_ , can’t bring himself to believe, _when_ _I_ _get_ _revenge_ , _when_ _I_ _truly_ _live_ , _when_ _I_ _can_ _finally_ _die._

Eye for an eye. All for all. All is decided. Yearning toward the sea, Dantès is a sailor, praying for her to shallow her gently, like she would a child.

When he dreams, he dreams of missing parents and starving children, of woman-waves and man-foam. Dantès dreams; he is glad of it. 

“Mon Père,” he prays with hands folded behind his back, a dead priest in his mind, hell around him.“Mon Père—“

He stops. His mouth agape. Being a ghost gives him benefits of seeing through things, and he saw, in his mind’s eye, his late father. He chokes at the image, at undreamed dreams and his father unremitting wrinkles around his neck, like a tree trunk, cut before reaching maturity.

His father has no cheeks, no eyes, no bones. He dies starving, believing in a son made of dirt and clay to fill him whole.

Monsieur Dantès does not throw him insults as he deserves it. He covers him with kisses and loving caresses. They felt insulting nevertheless.

Haydée is sweet. She doesn’t speak when he dreams; she doesn’t move her soft hand nor diamonds and rubies perched on her china silk. When he dreams; she is here. She doesn’t dream at all. 

“Mon Père,” he says to her, “will give me the name I need.”

She doesn’t respond. Dantès fancies that she couldn’t, because she knows what’s in a name. It renders her from princess to slave; she distrusts the way a name is made by birth. Haydée likes nameless things, she likes them like she would a gem; she would show it to the entire world, proudly so. 

Her eyes shone when he made his way to Paris, dimmed when he talked of the past. Even copper rusts after years of exposure.

What in a name? _Glory_ , he thinks, _humiliation_. All that is good and bad, all that is worth and worthless. _Life_. A name is for a life. 

Edmond Dantès is dead.

Haydée: modern Helen and Aphrodite. Her arms raised high like Achilles about to kill; Haydée sees something in him. She smiles, sweet and in that painful way of hers, and nods once.

Fresh and bleeding, a ghost’s answering smile is as pale and confusing as snow in July, feeling cold in a warm, hot summer.

 

* * *

 

Mercédès, with her shoulders cutting and smooth like seaweeds covered rocks, looked at him and said that she wants Albert to live. The Count said yes.

His own tears taste like salt. He thanks Him for it, being as kind and grateful as Lucifer was in heaven. 

Albert is saved. And with a steady, beating heart, one that he hadn’t heard in awhile, he hopes, in a slight and weak moment, to be saved too; with an anchor attached to his feet, slowly kissing wet seawater, a fate he has escaped, and escaped again.

He waits when Albert, pale as a ghost, says his verdict. No one shoots that day, but it smells too much like brunt letters and secret whispers, with the sky too blue and immaculate.

“My friend,” Albert says when his witnesses looked at him with a sort of abashed terror on their face, “it would seem it’s a bad day. It’s way too warm.” 

And he couldn’t speak. Everything seems small compared to the sky. Infinite. Recurring. Ever present. He can’t see anything else. Sweat prickles his skin and his fine embroidered cuffs serve not death, but some great sky-gazing, with blue stripes over his eyes. So, so blue.

Albert’s shadows lick his boots; the sun have risen already, his eyes stings from the heat, from the glow, from the blue-sky and golden-sun.

The Count nods once. He goes before he remembers how to cry.

It would be a great day to sail, he thinks with the pain not unlike a bullet in his chest. The sky is clear, I don’t mind the clouds.

 

* * *

 

It’s a secret, but Dantès never dreamt before Château d’If.

It’s with pleasure and even duty that he dreams when he has Père Faria in his arms, spasming and blood painting his lips coral red. He dreams what he did not dream before. Dantès dreams about living. 

Him living, but the corpse in his arms? Dantès thinks as naively as he can manage to be, of Mercédès, that her arms heal, and that Père Faria is a Saint that responds to prayers. He is having a brain fever, his head spinning with insistence and futility. All sound and fury.

“I don’t believe that you’ll revenge,” Père Faria says with ashes in his mouth, Dantès’ mind dreaming the words as conscience slips away. “Your heart only survives with mercy.” 

Dantès kisses his cold and damp forehead, and he is granted mercy, one last time, when the dead doesn’t woke up to scold him that his kisses feel like sea shattering against rocks, edging to the shipwrecked soil.

 

* * *

 

Maximilian looks exactly like his father. If only he did too.

Mercédès is in Marseilles, she hasn’t forgotten that dead name; had called him like death would reclaim him again. Being a ghost gives him the benefits of seeing through things. She knows what’s in a name.

Orpheus and him understand each other.

Maximilian has Albert’s pale, brave eyes. He is so old, he starts to remember them as youth, some children that played with him some other day, while he was looking at the trees grow old, then young again. Maximilian dances with young, pretty Valentine, the daughter of the man he vowed to ruin.

The youth dances; he cannot condemn this. He would be condemning the dead then, about a sailor that sailed too far, and the sea welcomed her with her cold, enrobing layers and layers of coated salt. 

Haydée says, her dress damp and her figure proud, “This is the end.”

The Count doesn’t ask when, there is something about hope that leaves no space for speculation. Can’t say _when_ _we_ _live_ , _when_ _we’ll_ _be_ _happy_ , _when_ _Maximilian_ _and_ _Valentine_ _marries_.

“My end,” he says instead, “isn’t death.”

“Your end, my lord, is great happiness and great relief. Everything in you is grand, my lord. There’s no need to deny greatness.” 

The girl, who looks so different from another girl he once longed to marry, with Greek brows and queenly grace, sets the sail. Her capable hands felt grand, and he felt small. This is the moment he would die for: to be nothing at all and so, so grateful.

“I would die for anything,” The Count confesses. “Is that greatness?” 

“I would die for you,” she says. 

Her capable hands, with golden bracelets round her wrists, touch his wet face. He remembers now. Why he dreamt so much and did so much. To touch someone was mercy, to receive warmth was redemption. Mercédès and her brown forgiving eyes; Haydée and her gentle arms. All that sea couldn’t give.

He sleeps on their small, tight ship during the night. As his hands touch the seawater and a hint of fish nipping at his fingers, he dreams of pearl-eyes and coral-lips.

 

* * *

 

Dantès can’t wait to hope.

 

 


End file.
